李宾 | 跨高山的景观 —— 剖行变化之中的一座中国高山

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TRANS-ALPINE LANDSCAPES

Transecting a Chinese high mountain in transition

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李宾 | 跨高山的景观 —— 剖行变化之中的一座中国高山

LI, Bin

Trans-alpine Landscapes

Transecting a Chinese high mountain in transition

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A doctoral thesis submitted to The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway

PUBLISHER

The Oslo School of Architecture and Design COVER ILLUSTRATION

Mount Gongga in transects Illustrated by Bin Li PRINT

Bodoni

TEMPLATE DESIGN BMR

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Abstract

The dissertation Trans-alpine Landscapes explores the changing landscapes of a high mountain in China affected by ongoing urbanization. Mount Gongga, the highest mountain of the Hengduan mountainous regions in Southwest China, is the main case for this study. A trans-geographical exploration brings in other alpine geographies—the Swiss Alps and the Norwegian Scandes—as the comparable references. The project evolves around empirical readings on landscape spaces and practiced landscapes along a series of travelled routes, between valleys and peaks that are intertwined with urbanization. Its main method is the transect walks, which have been employed both in the urbanizing east and the lesser developed west of the Gongga massif. Urbanization is understood not as demographic and spatial changes from countryside to city; urban functions and emphases have extensively expanded to encompass previously remote mountainous landscapes, and this forms the phenomena of extended urbanization. In the Hengduan, the new emphases are on transportation and tourist

infrastructure, facilitating the rise of a travel culture for leisure and outdoor activities.

The project deploys a landscape-informed approach by revealing landscape changes, challenges and qualities on the ground, in contrast to the more widespread tendency in the discipline of landscape architecture to read by plan. The photographic and the cartographic mappings along routes and pausing areas of regional, sub-regional and local scales are the tools for reading alpine landscapes. Through travels and transect walks, I found the east side of Mount Gongga more heavily developed and the west side in dilemma. I also found stretches of route around the mountain that were fragmented and suggested a more holistic reconsideration of route with light-footprint pausing areas. The walks also helped me register the multi- dimensional qualities of the alpine environment, and they prompted me to suggest the curation of a series of slow speed local routes to carry on these qualities for people, both local residents and visitors.

The dissertation argues that landscape architects can take the role of

curators, circle out slow and light approaches to landscape changes as well as construct representations of the alpine landscapes. The in-flux landscapes could then be transformed into educational, experienced, and ephemeral spaces.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank many colleagues, friends and family members from different stages of this project for their time, insight, companionship, and encouragement:

At the Mountain Institute in Chengdu and Gongga Research Station,

scientists Wang Genxu, Luo Ji, Liu Qiao, and Fang Yiping introduced historical and contemporary contexts on scientific explorations in disciplines of alpine ecology, glaciology, and human geography around Mount Gongga to me.

My interlocutors, guides and friends in Moxi and around Gongga: Xiao Shi, Yangyang, Lao Tan, Yan Lei, Yao Wei, Pachu, Gongbu, Zhuoma, Si Nan, Hou Zi, Xiaonong, Zou Tao[…] have supported me in empirical materials as well as logistics during the fieldwork. I cannot imagine how it would have been possible to conduct five research travels and countless walks around the mountain without them.

Archivists and librarians helped me search and interpret the diaries, maps, drawings, photographs and specimens from the early expeditions, including Monica Bussmann at ETH Zürich University Archive, Lisa Pearson at Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, David Boufford and Anthony Brach at Harvard University Herbaria, and Lorna Mitchell and Lesley Scott at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Department head Yang Rui in landscape architecture hosted my visiting researcher period at the School of Architecture of Tsinghua University in spring 2017 and provided significant insights to my project, together with other colleagues at the department.

At the Department of Architecture of ETH Zürich in spring 2019, Milica Topalovic and the Chair of Architecture of Territory hosted me and

comparatively discussed urbanization in European- and Chinese alpine cases.

Two design studios at AHO related to this dissertation could not have been carried out without my colleagues Luis Callejas, Mattias Josefsson, Hannes Zander and Biljana Nikolic — I thank them for their passion, inspiration, collaboration and knowledge. I would also like to thank all the students who participated in the AHO studios in Oslo and in Tromsø, particularly, Sanaz Akbari Koli, Oskar Hjellbakk, Aztrid Novillo, Mia Thun, Patrick Warshawski, and Jacob Wood.

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My colleagues and friends Joe Crowdy, Milja Tuomivaara at AHO, and Li Zheng at Beijing Forestry University shared their writing knowledge during my writing stages.

At my former place of employment, Vogt Landscape Architects, several discussions were held with Günther Vogt and colleagues, and with Thomas Kissling at the Chair of Günther Vogt at ETH Zürich.

Reader Gareth Doherty, for your comprehensive and specific comments on the work. Your insight and precision have made the finalization of the dissertation possible.

My supervisors Karl Otto Ellefsen and Janike Kampevold Larsen, for your dedication, knowledge and cultivation of my project throughout the whole process. I would like to express my gratitude for your constant

encouragement and support.

I would like to dedicate this PhD project to the memory of my grandfather, Zhang Chengqiu, who was the chief urban planner of the newly established provincial city Zhengzhou in central China from the 1950s. He was my first mentor in teaching me how to read a map. His passion for cartography, geography and landscape beyond just the scope of architecture continues to influence me and my work.

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1 INTRODUCTION

A Mountain in Transition

Draw a circle, for the most beautiful places in China.

给中国最美的地方画个圈。

—Chinese National Geography 2004.7

A mountain is not always as remote as we may imagine. In the face of the Anthropocene, urbanization has been extending to the alpine zones of our planet, in high mountain regions. Alpine landscapes are operated more as destinations for recreation than as starting points for the exportation of resources. They are transformed through a spectrum of developments serving urban dwellers’ leisure life. We can find such mountains in the European Alps and in the Scandes (the Scandinavian Mountains). In China, while much of the urban and landscape research focuses on the eastern part of the country, the mountainous regions to the west are undergoing

dramatic changes. The Hu Line—an imaginary line defined by Chinese geographer Hu Huanyong in 1935—reveals uneven growth between the country’s east and west and might serve as a dividing boundary in this respect as well. We can observe imposed infrastructure and built forms on mountainous terrains. We can trace the complex interplays between those forms and the experienced and lived alpine landscapes, we can feel the connection and the tension between metropolises and alpine zones.

Mount Gongga is one such high mountain located to the west of the huge city networks of the Chengdu Plain. The mountain carries expedition

narratives, thematic landscape layers, and urbanized forms. It provides a place to explore specific landscape changes in relation to urbanization as a global phenomenon. This dissertation targets readers from diverse cultural

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backgrounds and disciplines of landscape architecture, urban studies, geography and architecture. I introduce a range of landscape-informed perspectives on reading Chinese alpine landscapes to readers keen to understand a section of China’s heartlands in transition. I hope that through this reading, other ideas on the future scenarios of China’s alpine zones and their extensions will be unfolded in the future.

The Travel Stories

My story with Mount Gongga (贡嘎山) began in Beijing the summer of 2004.

I read a special issue of the Chinese National Geography magazine (CNG) presenting a portrait of the Hengduan Mountains (

横断山脉群

). The slogan on the cover page read: ‘draw a circle for the most beautiful places in China’.

Inside, an essay pictured the highest mountain of the Hengduan ranges, Mount Gongga, whose summit is 7556m above sea level, situated only a few hundred kilometres from Sichuan’s provincial city Chengdu. Having grown up in the largest metropolis of the North China Plain, Beijing, I was immediately attracted to the snowy peaks, steep gorges, ethnic settlements, and exotic landscapes described in the essay. The thematic issue was entitled the Grand Shangri-La, borrowing the name of the fictional place from a 1930's novel Lost Horizon.¹ The novel was inspired by narratives from expeditions to the Hengduan, including those by Joseph Rock, whose travels were under the mission of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University and National Geographic Society. In 2005, the CNG magazine introduced an aesthetic paradigm to the Chinese public. Seven high mountains in China, including Mount Gongga, were selected as the ten most beautiful Chinese mountains.

These mountains, located in Western China, each rising more than 5000m above sea level, challenge the classical Shan-shui culture—a comprehensive lifestyle involving mountainous scenery, painting, literature, and garden. As CNG’s editor Shan Zhiqiang argues, it seems that the ancient Chinese scholar- officials could not appreciate the aesthetics of extremely-high mountains, perhaps because these mountains were difficult to access and their ‘relative height’ in relation to the vista is not as significant as Huangshan, for

instance.²

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1 James Hilton, Lost Horizon (IndoEuropeanPublishing.com, 2018).

2 Huangshan (Yellow Mountain) in Eastern China can be considered representative of the classic Shan-shui paradigm. See Zhiqiang Shan, ‘

古人不爱极高山

(The Ancient Disfavouring High Mountains)’, Chinese National Geography, September 2003.

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Six years later, I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I would earn a master’s degree in architecture at MIT. In my spare time, I would occasionally take a walk along the Emerald Necklace to the Arnold

Arboretum. In the Arboretum, I learned about plants that had been brought back by early flora chasers from the Hengduan Mountains of Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. In a course taught by Swiss engineer Jürg Conzett at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, I heard about a Swiss cartographer—

Eduard Imhof from ETH Zürich—who drew maps of the Alps and developed cartographic techniques for mapping these landscapes.

After moving to Norway, I discovered to my surprise that right after Rock's expedition, in 1930, Imhof had conducted a field trip to Mount Gongga together with geologist Arnold Heim and Chinese scholars from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. I became aware that the mountain had evolved as a global construct for scientific expeditions during the 1920s and 1930s. The first successful summit was accomplished by the American climbers in 1932.³ The second summit was completed by the Chinese climbing team in 1957.⁴ After these two summits, Gongga gained

international and domestic fame in mountaineering, in addition to scientific exploration. In 1983, a group of Norwegian mountaineers led by Nils Faarlund took a one-month trip by train from Oslo to Mount Gongga via Chengdu.Practicing the philosophy of ‘deep ecology’, the group focused more on eco-friendly experiences in the mountains than summiting peaks.⁵ Although this high mountain was internationally known to scientists and mountaineers, it was little known by the Chinese and international public in general before the 2005 aesthetic promotion.

When I decided to do case research on the geography of a high mountain to understand how alpine landscapes are changing and interplaying with urbanization processes, my interest leaned to selecting a high mountain—a specific large-scaled territory that appears geographically isolated but is in fact extensively linked to the outside—in the contemporary globalized world.

Mount Gongga was connected to a small number of Chinese and international researchers in the early 20^th century and discovered by the general public, myself included, in the beginning of the 21^st century.

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3 Richard L. Burdsall, Men Against the Clouds: The Conquest of Minya Konka (New York: Harper &

Brothers, 1935).

4 Zhanchun Shi,

我们征服了世界闻名的高峰：中国第一支登山队征服贡嘎山记

We

Conquered the World Famous Mountain (Beijing: Ren min ti yu chu ban she, 1958).

5 My colleague Beata Labuhn conducted an interview with mountaineer Nils Faarlund and architect Dag Norling on questions I proposed about this trekking trip from Norway to Mount Gongga.

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From the field

I travelled to Mount Gongga for the first time in June 2016, from Oslo via Beijing and Chengdu. I intended to explore the mountain’s most remote place—Zimei village. My itinerary was to first drive to the west side of the mountain, where the road turned into a path; then, trek over a mountain pass and down to the village; and finally, walk further towards the east, where the path met the road on the other side. By walking, I immersed myself in the landscapes, enabled encounters with people, and embraced the unexpected climate and the unfamiliar topography. In the two years that followed, I conducted four repeated visits to Gongga. I used field notes to record my experiences and the changes in the landscape between 2016 and 2018.

June 2016, Zimei (子梅). We are two nature travellers standing at an elevation of the 4600m Zimei Pass. The mist refuses to let us contemplate the 7556m summit. We are above the tree line, fully exposed to the bare rocks, the strong wind, and the heavy rain of the monsoon season. Pausing shortly at the pass, we decide to descend fast. Other senses are activated in the mist—hearing, smell, touch, sense of orientation. Touching the alpine oaks (Quercus aquifolioides) at the roadside, we find ourselves reaching the tree line again after countless zigzag turns. The mist disappears, a few houses appear, and the lost vista regains. We arrive at Zimei, a remote village at 3250m with a total of nine households. Staying with one family, we met bird watchers and university students from Chengdu, a trekking group from eight different countries, and an amateur mountaineering team.

April 2017, Yulin (

榆林

). We are twenty-nine trekkers participating in the Yulin-Zimei trek organized by an outdoor club from Chengdu. Departure from Chengdu and after eight hours, we get off a tourist bus at the end of an asphalt road nearby a hydropower station. A caravan carries our bags and kitchen tents and follows us in the mountains. We camp overnight in a wide valley at 3400m, the first camping area of the trek. Our local guides come from Yulin—a village branching out from the national scenic highway G318, at the intersection with the Ganzi prefecture's capital city Kangding. Feeling sick from the height, I take a detour led by a local to his 'spring home'—a tent in a temporal settlement, assembled and moved uphill for picking a type of caterpillar fungus (Cordyceps sinensis). A heavy snowfall blocks the 4900m mountain pass, and the whole group has to change route. After walking over the outer pass over 4400m and down to Yulongxi Valley, a pasture landscape of yak herding unfolds in front of us.

October 2018, Hailuogou (海螺沟). We are six researchers stepping into a grove at the 2800m glacial terminus. An hour-long bus ride brings us and tourists from Moxi—a major tourist town of Gongga— to the Hailuogou

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Glacier Park. Next to the grove is an artificial moraine lake in front of which tourists are taking selfies. Meanwhile, alpine ecology researchers are defining a sample plot of moss and lichen; soil researchers are collecting soil samples in every five-centimetre layer. According to the lead professor, the grove displays a plant succession process from the year 1990 as well as a glacier retreat process. From the terminus up, a gondola lift carries tourists to the viewing platforms at 3600m. Glaciologists use the gondola

conveniently to change a device for a weather station. Tourists arrive from above complaining about the foggy weather and the lack of views to the peak and the glacier.

From the institutions

Parallel to the field visits, between 2016 and 2019, I visited four institutions:

Chinese Academy of Sciences in Chengdu, ETH Zürich, Harvard University, and the Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh. These visits introduced me to the stories of some of the early scientific explorations in Mount Gongga. I was curious to understand the explorers' approach to an unfamiliar and uncharted geography, the tools they used, the routes they took, the landscapes they experienced, and the research topics they worked on. All these visits resonate with my own landscape inquiries into this high mountain.

At the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Chengdu,⁶ I met scientists from the disciplines of alpine ecology, glaciology, geology, and human geography who are actively doing research journeys in the Hengduan region. Science-making was one of the urban activities that locally extended into the mountainous landscapes and globally informed other geographies. In the 1980s, the scientific value of Mount Gongga became the primary engine in transforming its east side.

Geologist Chen Fubin from IMHE-CAS suggested transforming the Hailuogou glacier area into a glacier park and opening it up to the public. The glacier park was designed to integrate ideas of scientific expedition. Four camps were planned from 2000m to 3600m, according to the changing elevations and bioclimatic belts. Integrated with the development of the glacier park, the CAS suggested establishing the alpine ecosystem observation and experiment station of Mount Gongga, including a 1600m base station in the nearest town Moxi and a 3000m alpine station near Camp Three in

connection with the headquarter in Chengdu.

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6 This institution is referred to as ‘The Mountain Institute’ in the rest of the dissertation.

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At the University Archive of ETH Zürich, I read through Eduard Imhof's drawings, maps and letters about Mount Gongga, and Arnold Heim's China travel diary from 1929-1931. Their Minya Konka expedition routes follow the Yangtze River to Chongqing, and further west to Kangding—the capital city of Sichuan's Ganzi Prefecture—along valleys around Gongga.⁷ Heim's field notes highlighted everyday places of visit, inserting sketches of geological sections and flora samples like edelweiss and coneifolia. One goal of the expedition was to perform a cartographical survey and to measure the height of the summit. Imhof made cartographic sketches to document the travelling routes and to trace the mountain's profile in sectional drawings. His water- colour technique depicted the region's vibrant culture and lived landscape.

Photography was used as another important tool for visually documenting the landscapes, as well as for the photogrammetry method used in measuring the height.

At Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum and the Herbaria Archive, I was introduced to the field notes of Joseph Rock, and herbarium specimens he collected from the Hengduan Region in 1924-29. Besides staying in the Lijiang area of Yunnan, Rock explored the south tip of the Hengduan. In the spring of 1929, Rock's expedition team headed up north, approaching the west side of Gongga. The team aimed to make the first set of photographs of Gongga's snow peaks from close range, and brought equipment including

‘photographic supplies, films and colour plates, developer’.⁸ The route they took overlapped with the Yulin-Zimei trek, passing Yulongxi Valley, Yulin and Kangding. Other than the visual documentation, Rock speculated that the summit of Minya Konka exceeded the height of Everest. Although this later proved wrong, the speculation attracted a more global attention, resulting in the expeditions of Heim and Imhof, and the first summit by Terris Moore and Richard Berdsall. From Rock's archive at Arboretum, I learned about Ernest Henry Wilson, a plant collector who travelled to Western China in 1899–1910 and introduced thousands of new plants to gardens in Europe and America.

Wilson visited the east side of Gongga in July and August of 1908, taking photos along the Dadu River Valley. In the Herbaria Archive, I found specimens collected by Fang Wenpei—a Chinese botanist and expert on Aceraceae and Rhododendron—in the 1920s for the Science Society of

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7 Minya Konka was one of the old names for Gongga, used in the 1930s by Joseph Rock, Richard Burdsall, Eduard Imhof and others. Another spelling version, Minya Gongkar, was used by Arnold Heim.

8 Joseph Francis Rock, ‘The Glories of the Minya Konka. Magnificent Snow Peaks of the China- Tibetan Border Are Photographed at Close Range by a National Geographic Society Expedition’, The National Geographic Magazine LVIII, no. 4 (October 1930): 385–487.

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China. Fang received his PhD in plant taxonomy from the University of Edinburgh⁹, and after returning to China worked at CAS Institute of Botany and taught at Sichuan University in Chengdu. The study of Fang and Rock linked me to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, where part of Rock’s archive is located and the plant taxonomy of Hengduan’s rhododendron has been developed.

Today, the burgeoning travel culture is overwriting the narratives of scientific expeditions. In Zimei, I met amateur explorers (like bird watchers, flora chasers) who are interested in embodied experience and professional explorers (like mountaineers and scientists) who are orientated towards the pursuit of knowledge. In Yulin and on a trek to Zimei, I followed hikers who enjoy the athletic challenges of the altitude and the thin air. In Hailuogou, I met scientists, bus tourists and independent tourists, all with different and overlapping interest in the mountain. And in all of these places, I stayed with local residents, whose everyday-lived landscapes are being adapted to tourism, infrastructure development and other forms of urbanization. I consider myself a professional landscape- and architecture explorer with knowledge background of design disciplines.

A Short Introduction to Mount Gongga

As a geographical trope, the name of the Hengduan Mountains depicts the topographical challenge embedded in the high mountains. Heng (

横

) in Chinese means 'transverse', and duan (断) means 'breaking'; together, Hengduan means 'breaking the transverse'. The Hengduan is a group of parallel mountain ranges, generally north-south orientated, between 25^oN–

35ôN and 97ôE–103ôE. The general Hengduan is composed of seven mountain ranges (Min Shan, Qionglai Shan, Daxue Shan, Shaluli Shan, Mangkang Shan, Taniantaweng Shan, Gaoligong Shan) and six rivers (Min, Dadu, Yalong, Jinsha, Lancang-Mekong, Nu-Salween) from east to west. The

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9 See Wen-pei Fang, ‘A Monograph of Chinese Aceraceae’ (Ph.D., University of Edinburgh, 1937).

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region spans over 1,000,000 km², with a population of eighty million, including the adjacent large cities, covering a large area of Sichuan and Yunnan, as well as a small part of Gansu, Qinghai, and Tibet. Located a few hundred kilometres from the Lanzhou-Chengdu-Kunming metropolitan belts, the region's east part has seven ethnical autonomous prefectures: Gannan of Gansu province; Aba, Ganzi and Liangshan of Sichuan province; Diqing, Nujiang and Dali of Yunnan province. The high mountains and the deep valleys of Hengduan are the homelands of many different ethnic groups, such as the Kham Tibetan people and the Yi people. Kham Tibetans live mostly above 2500m, and the Yi people live at lower elevations. Historically known as the 'Tibetan-Yi' corridor, the north-south oriented mountains encouraged connectivity along routes in the valleys, while blocking the east- to-west links.

Mount Gongga is part of the Daxue Shan range of the Hengduan, between the Dadu River and the Yalong River. From the 1000m Dadu River Basin to the 7556m summit, within a distance less than 30km, Gongga's east slope presents an integral bioclimatic transition, starting with the subtropical semi- arid valley, the subtropical evergreen forest, and the temperate mixed forest;

from 3000m up, it continues with the sub-alpine coniferous forest, the alpine shrub meadow, and the alpine tundra; the transition reaches the permanent snow at 4900m.¹⁰

The name Gongga is a short version of its Tibetan name 'Minya Konka'.

Minya is the name of a Kham Tibetan subgroup who consider Gongga their holy mountain, and in Tibetan, Konka means 'snow white'. Gongga is in the east part of Sichuan’s Ganzi Prefecture. The mountain is co-governed by the county of Luding to the east, the city of Kangding to the north and west, Jiulong county to the southwest, and the city Ya'an to the southeast. The major ethnic groups living in the area are the Kang Tibetan, Han, and Yi people.

Moxi and Xinxing are two towns in Luding on Gongga's eastern slope. The towns are situated on the Moxi Platform, which was formed by debris deposits of a glaciation from 7000 years ago.¹¹ The Moxi Platform, 8km in length, is between two glacial runoffs, and has an average of 120m thickness

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10 See “Fig.4 The section along Hailuogou in Mt.Gongga” with illustration text in Chinese. Fubin Chen and Shenghuai Gao, eds., Research on Alpine Ecosystem in Gongga Mountain (Chengdu University of Science and Technology Press, 1993), 19.

11 Junyan Zhang, Genwei Cheng, and Yongfei Li, ‘Early Holocene High Magnitude Debris Flow Events and Environmental Change as Illustrated by the Moxi Platform, Hengduan Mountains, SW China’, Journal of Mountain Science 3, no. 2 (1 June 2006): 125–30.

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of deposits. Both towns and the villages uphill have a total of 800-hectare of farmland. Along the valleys to the summit are two of Gongga's glaciers, Hailuogou and Yanzigou, opened to the public as glacier parks. Nowadays, Moxi serves as a resort town, and a bus service connects from there to the high-altitude landscapes.

Chinese alpine regions are being urbanized rapidly, and the Hengduan is an urgent case. This urbanization can be clearly observed in infrastructural developments. For a long time, the primary transportation infrastructures that crossed the Hengduan were the China National Highways (

国道

Guodao) passing Chengdu, including the G318 via Kangding of Ganzi Prefecture and the G317 via Maerkang of Aba Prefecture. Starting in 2014 and put to use in 2018, two new expressways G4218 and G4217 were under construction as the fast versions of G318 and G317, respectively. With 80%

of the roads running on bridges and through tunnels, both expressways shorten the travel time from Chengdu to Kangding (Mount Gongga) and Maerkang (Mount Siguniang) from seven hours to three and a half hours.

Regional highways include the G5 (Ya'an-Shimian), the planned Luding- Shimian expressway to the east of Gongga, and the S215 (Waze-Shade) to the west of the mountain.

Tourism has become one of the main engines of the urbanization process in the Hengduan. In recent years, outdoor recreation has been burgeoning beyond just mass tourism. According to China's largest outdoor website, in 2015, there were around 2,000,000 outdoor tourists, including 750,000 hikers and trekkers; 70% of the tourists were from the east coast megalopolises such as Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (Jingjinji), Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta. The Hengduan Mountains of Sichuan and Yunnan emerged as the hotspots for hiking, trekking, camping, and

mountaineering.¹² Trekking routes and tours around Mount Gongga and Mount Siguniang are documented and marketed in domestic and international outdoor websites and guidebooks, such as 8264, lvye, SummitPost, and Lonely Planet.

Six rivers in the Hengduan have been transformed into hydropower energy bases. Cascade hydropower stations are planned and built along the river basins. Dadu River, with an elevation difference over 4000 metres, produced

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户外资料网编辑中心

, ‘《2015

上半年中国户外旅行用户行为分析报告》发布 - 图说 -

户外资料网

8264.Com’,

户外资料网

, accessed 7 April 2016, http://www.8264.com/viewnews- 103295-page-1.html.

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over 30 billion kWh electricity in 2018 and delivered it to the metropolitan areas of Sichuan.¹³ The on-going construction of the stations is negotiated with the routes of transport links and the displacement of settlements. The Hengduan is a transitional border where farmland meets pasture. Food production in the east and the south is mainly in form of agricultural plantations between 500m and 2000m. The west and the north are covered mainly by pasture lands, with elevations between 2000m and 4000m, used for herding practices. In 1990–2015, the land use of the whole region for food was decreased by 1132 square kilometres.¹⁴ High altitudes and steep slopes restrict food production. The national policy Tuigeng Huanlin or the 'Returning Farmland to Forest' programme further reduce land use for food.

In Sichuan province, where part of the Hengduan is located, the targeted result of this programme has been ‘afforesting and reforesting barren hillsides’ in order to manage landscape degradation, meanwhile mitigating poverty and providing alternative livelihoods.¹⁵

With bioclimatic belts from zones ranging from subtropical, through temperate and alpine, to ice desert, the Hengduan region is home to abundant natural habitats along varied elevations and is one of the world's most biodiverse regions. Today, there are over fifty national nature reserves in the region, mainly in the west part of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.

Alpine research topics have brought many science making activities to the high mountains since the expeditions of the 1920-30s. Research stations, experiment plots and monitoring facilities are spread out in the region's nature reserves.

Mount Gongga conveys overlapping needs in development and in preservation with multiple official designations. Gongga is one of the high mountains in the Hengduan in which the 'national scenic area' and the 'national nature reserve' designate the same area, although with slightly different boundaries. The Overall Planning of Gongga Mountain Scenic Area (2014-2030) was developed by clustering the characteristics of alpine landscape, glacial landscape, and hybrid landscape, as well as by creating zones of protected area, tourist area, and coordinated area. The rationales

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13 This is equal to 1/5 of Norway’s hydropower production in 2017.

14 Zhenqin Shi, Wei Deng, and Shaoyao Zhang, ‘Spatio-Temporal Pattern Changes of Land Space in Hengduan Mountains during 1990–2015’, Journal of Geographical Science 28, no. 4 (April 2018): 529–42.

15 Christine Jane Trac et al., ‘Environmental Reviews and Case Studies: Is the Returning Farmland to Forest Program a Success? Three Case Studies from Sichuan’, Environmental Practice 15, no. 3 (1 September 2013): 350–66, 351.

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behind clustering and zoning mostly deal with the visual features of the landscapes, as well as the administration and responsibilities for management of each zone. Parallel to the scenic planning, The Overall Planning of Gongga Mountain National Nature Reserve (2019-2030) was approved in 2018, covering the core zone, the buffer zone, and the experimental zone of the protected area. Certain development and construction are allowed in the experimental zone. This zone overlaps with the tourist area of the scenic planning. The overlapping area is a 200km loop around Gongga at a sub-regional scale.

Literature on Mount Gongga

Forty years after the expedition, in 1974, Eduard Imhof published the book Die grossen kalten Berge von Szetschuan, which included comprehensive survey maps of Mount Gongga from the expeditions between 1930-32, as well as many sketches, photographs, and diagrams. In the opening lines of the book, Imhof expressed the excitement of a cartographer when encountering uncharted geography on maps. What he wrote can be

translated as ‘For a topographer and geographer, nothing is as captivating as a large, empty space on the map, a white spot with the label

“unsurveyed/unexplored”—you have to go in there!’.¹⁶

There is a body of literature on the scientific (flora and fauna hunting, geological research, cartography and etc.) and the mountaineering explorations of Mount Gongga. One significant early piece of writing was Joseph Rock's The Glories of the Minya Konka, published in National Geographic Magazine in 1930, which featured a package of comprehensive photographs of the mountain peaks. Rock's field notes are collected at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University and at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Arnold Heim's book Minya Gongkar: Forschungsreise ins

Hochgebirge von Chinesisch Tibet, published in German in 1933, documented the Chinese-Swiss expedition and the geological discoveries made between 1929-31. Heim's travel diaries about Gongga and China are collected at the University Archive of ETH Zürich. The American team that firstly summited Gongga published Men Against the Clouds: The Conquest of Minya Konka in 1935, which was later considered as a classic book on mountaineering. After

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16 The original German reads: Für eine Topographen und Geographen ist nichts so berückend wie ein großer, leerer Fleck in der Landkarte, eine weiße Lücke mit der Bezeichnung unsurveyed - unerforscht. Da muß man hinein! See Eduard Imhof, Die grossen kalten Berge von Szetschuan : Erlebnisse, Forschungen und Kartierungen im Minya-Konka-Gebirge, vol. 1, Montes mundi (Zürich: Füssli, 1974), 1.

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the Chinese team summited Gongga, the book We Conquered the World Famous Mountain (

我们征服了世界闻名的高峰

1958) was published; it depicted their expedition experiences in 1957.

Starting the 1980s with the establishment of the alpine research station in Mount Gongga, scholars from various institutes of Chinese Academy of Sciences continually published contributions on Gongga's alpine topics, including Vegetation of Gongga Shan (

贡嘎山植被

, 1985), Research on Alpine Ecosystem in Gongga Mountain (

贡嘎山高山生态环境研究

, 1993), Researches of the Forest Ecosystems on Gongga Mountain (

贡嘎山森林生态系统研究

, 1997), and so forth. In 2010, Tracing One Hundred Years of Change: Illustrating the Environmental Changes in Western China was published in Chinese and English. The book coupled photos taken from the same place by botanist Ernest Wilson in the 1900s and by ecologist Yin Kaipu in the 2000s, which includes the Hengduan region and Gongga's eastern slope. Two PhD dissertations, published in 2008 and 2012 by Chengdu University of Technology, concerned the studies on geoscience landscape features around Mount Gongga region in order to suggest modes and models for developing tourism.¹⁷

Research Questions

Urbanization is traditionally understood as a process of population flow from countryside to cities, and the city forms are enlarged and growing.¹⁸ In this dissertation, the concept of urbanization carries a more novel definition, which is: urbanization in the non-urban areas, as a process of operating specific territorial landscapes (such as alpine landscapes) and transforming them with more urban functions. The first main question of this dissertation is about understanding the challenges of urbanization in mountainous areas:

How are the changes of alpine landscapes affected by urbanization?

Reading territorial landscapes was traditionally linked to aerial perspectives and layered mappings, and is nowadays associated with

——————————

17 See: Li Xian

李娴

, ‘Study on Tourism Geo-science Features and Development Model in the Gongga Mountain Area

贡嘎山地区旅游地学特征及开发模式研究

’ ( PhD

博士

,Chengdu University of Technology

成都理工大学

, 2008); Zhao Chuan

赵川

, ‘Study on the Protection and Development Mode of Geoscience Landscape in the Gongga Mountain Region

贡嘎山地学景观保护与开发模式研究

’ (PhD

博士

, Chengdu University of Technology

成都理工大学

, 2012).

18 National Geographic Society, ‘Urbanization’, National Geographic Society, 22 October 2019, http://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/urbanization/.

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geographical information systems, satellite images, and big-data analysis.¹⁹ The aerial approach leads to an overall planning of such a territory in zones on a plan. In a planning proposal of Mount Gongga, there are a total of seventeen zones planned for the whole mountain, and a recreational focus is assigned to each zone.²⁰ The limitation of such a zoning approach is that the territory is understood as an abstract, mosaic-like, and static plan. The zoning ignores the fact that the lived and the practiced landscapes are in motion, and they are time-based and experience-oriented. The landscape-informed perspective in this dissertation is a reading approach from the ground through field trips and fieldwork, involving the continuity of space and time.

The second main question concerns methods of investigation: How could a landscape-informed perspective open up other ways of reading and other strategies for adapting the urbanization to the vulnerable alpine landscapes, and how does it expand the discussion of the rapid changes of rural China?

The Hu Line, mentioned in the open lines of this dissertation, is a line drawn between the north-eastern city Heihe and the south-western city Tengchong, running diagonally across China. When it was drawn in 1935, the Hu Line divided China into two parts: 96% of the nation's population lived to the east of the line, which covered 36% of the nation's land, whereas 4% lived in the remaining area, 64%, to the west.²¹ The Hengduan and its Mount Gongga are near the line to the west. Eighty-five years later, the Hu Line has hardly changed in terms of the distribution of population, yet the level of mobility has been significantly increased. The number of visits to Gongga has grown parallel to the reorganization and construction of transportation

infrastructures.

Table 1 Number of visits and road kilometres in the Mount Gongga region, 2014-18 Number of visits Road reconstruction (km) Type of road 2014 925,000

2015 1,259,828

2016 1,460,926 32 Road in Hailuogou Park

2017 1,828,204 109 Roads to every village

2018 2,099,946 85 Scenic road

135 Expressway

Source: Hailuogou Scenic Area Administrative Bureau

——————————

19 This tradition refers to Ian McHarg’s layered mapping.

20 See the main drawing of The Overall Plan of Gongga Mountain Scenic Area (2014-2030), drawing 13.

21 Hu Line was drawn between Heihe of Heilongjiang Province and Tengchong of Yunan Province, also called Heihe-Tengchong Line. Huanyong Hu, ‘

中国人口之分布——附统计表与密度图--

《地理学报》

1935

年

02

期

’, Acta Geographica Sinica 2, no. 2 (1935): 33–74.

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Mount Gongga itself has been facing multiple challenges that are changing at a fast pace. The overlapping effects of urbanization are multi-layered:

enhancing transportation links, developing touristic programmes, producing hydropower energies, conducting scientific exploration, studying and protecting natural habitats, coordinating food production, and so forth. How to understand these overlapping acts and forms in order to make strategies for future transformation and to prepare for future changes?

Both climate change and urbanization directly impact high mountains.

The recreational value of Gongga's landscapes is constantly affected by the retreating process of glaciers and the upward movement of the bioclimatic belts. The change of climate has brought longer monsoon seasons and heavier snowfalls—a challenge when it comes to preparing for and responding to disasters, encouraging ecological and social resilience when thinking of the high mountain's future interventions. Moreover, with rising elevation, the alpine landscapes' own agency is increasingly limited in terms of responding to the imported urban layers. The landscape informs us in every moment—and this information is especially clear and observable if we live with or visit an alpine landscape.

My research goal at the beginning of the PhD process was to understand the physical impact and forms of urbanization in China’s high mountains by looking at the case of Mount Gongga through the lenses of imposed infrastructure and tourism. I soon realized the limitations of researching the topic from a distance. At this early stage, I collected geographical data accessed via open web sources, data-driven reports from various travel websites, and planning maps of the region from governmental bureaus. Yet the aerial big-data approach kept me distanced from comprehending the multiple aspects and the rich complexities of this mountain case, and from tracing it across multiple scales and dimensions. While gathering literature for the writing of Article 1, I found out that there were hardly any research writings about the spatial components of the region, and from the

perspectives of landscape architecture and on-site landscape inquiries. The existing literature showed a lack of humanistic and qualitative readings of high mountains. The knowledge primarily stemmed from scientific perspectives on mountain research, geographical studies, ecology, and planning, with the aid of quantitative tools. An aerial approach with layered mapping was not enough to do a nuanced reading of the multiple facets. As stated earlier, they tended to generate planning strategies that are rigid and

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monotonous. Landscape-informed fieldwork, or a more ‘vertical’ approach, may help with reading the landscapes thicker.²²

The second challenge I encountered was the rapid landscape changes to Mount Gongga while the project was developing. During the second journey to the mountain in 2017, I observed how the burgeoning tourism had affected the landscape on the ground since my first visit in 2016. For example, the group trekking activities had reduced the landscape space for herding and created a seasonal trail over the landscape which hybridized with the local practice on fungus-picking. The changes encouraged me to continue with repeated visits, to trace changes over a given period of time.

The third challenge concerned the large spanning of scales. The spatial forms of urbanization involve gigantic infrastructure such as expressways in a territory, as well as everyday spatial practice of a place, e.g. trail guiding and yak herding. How could a researcher cover the empirical research from territory to place? For me, travel as an approach was the answer. The itinerary of each visit, the routes planned and followed, and the pausing places en route were of significance for narrowing down the scope and in guiding towards the findings.

The Articles and the Exegesis

This PhD project experienced strokes of serendipity, both following the initial research proposal and beyond. I conducted repeated visits to Mount Gongga and a couple of journeys in the Alps and in the Scandes, experiencing many detours and encounters. I taught two Master of Landscape Architecture design studios (based in Oslo and in Tromsø in northern Norway) — they informed and were informed by the PhD research. These studios looked at alpine landscapes, the first focusing on the Colombian Andes and the second on Gongga, and both studios referred to the high mountains and alpine zones of Norway. Some experiments tested in the studios contributed to the PhD project as well, especially in discussing fieldwork and visualization methods.

The dissertation is composed of four peer-reviewed journal articles and a substantial exegesis. Three articles were published and the last has been accepted in peer-reviewed journals on landscape architecture in China and in

——————————

22 ‘Vertical’ here, referring to fieldwork, has been borrowed from Gareth Doherty’s writing on landscape research method. See Gareth Doherty, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (Univ of California Press, 2017), 37.

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Europe, in Chinese and English. The four articles, written annually from 2016 to 2019, were the key outcomes of each year. Yet for each article, limitations are obvious in content and in format. An exegesis provides supplementary material to the articles written at various stages of the PhD project in order to make sense of them. The exegesis conveys consistency and the rationales of the project, as well as generating critique and reflections. I will summarize the main points from the four articles in the paragraphs below. I will discuss how they are compiled, and in what way to relate the articles written over four years to the dissertation, reflectively.

Article 1: Trekking and Alpine Landscapes

The first article is the hypothesis of the PhD project, and was written before my first journey to the Hengduan and Mount Gongga. The article addressed the phenomenon of urban transformation in the Hengduan driven by the rising outdoor tourism. The hypothesis was that a trans-geographical reading on the alpine geographies of Switzerland and Norway and their urban networks in the landscapes could be relevant for the understanding of current urbanization processes in the Hengduan and the strip connecting Chengdu and Gongga. The first part talked about the ideas of walking, the increase of trekking activities in the Hengduan, and the challenges to the protected areas, the infrastructures, and the villages at high altitudes. The second part proposed the Swiss Alps and the Norwegian mountain systems as a reference to the Hengduan. The Swiss system constructs intense urban footprints on the landscapes by densifying the transportation links,

materializing alpine resorts and routes, and branding the alpine villages. The Norwegian system created light footprints by practicing the trekking networks, regulating national parks, and curating tourist routes. The third part described the relevance of the two European systems to the Hengduan.

The last part concluded that the Swiss and the Norwegian systems could prompt future discussions on the urbanization and regional strategies, trekking routes in relation to natural reserves, built forms, and alpine villages.

The article was co-authored with Karl Otto Ellefsen at AHO and published in July 2016 in the theme issue ‘Mountain Landscape’ of the peer-reviewed journal Landscape Architecture (风景园林), in Chinese.

Article 2: Imaging an Excursion, Imagining an Expedition

The second article discussed a fieldwork method—photographic mapping—

based on the process and outcomes of a design studio I taught at AHO.

Photography as a medium performed the vertical methods through travelling in two alpine geographies (Norway and Colombia). The discussion is based on Behind the Hill, Into the Wild, a landscape design studio of the Master of

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Landscape Architecture (Oslo) programme in the autumn of 2016. The methods aimed to imagine the future alternatives of a currently inaccessible high mountain of the Andes. The article started by pointing out the

challenges of mapping the high places. It briefly reviewed a trans- geographical visualization from Alexander von Humboldt’s geography of plants to modern visualization techniques. It then described a method of making the photographic images in observing and recording an alpine landscape, and to prepare and imagine the future scenarios of another alpine landscape. The article articulated the travelling experiences and field

exercises of the studio in making photos. Photography and its post-editing processes bridged landscapes that were imaged and imagined. The

photographic fieldwork informed the later design process. The article was co- authored with Luis Callejas at AHO, and published in the peer-reviewed journal Landscape Architecture (

风景园林

), in Chinese, in the theme issue 'Landscape Representation' in December 2017.

Article 3: Tools and Alpine Landscapes

The third article presented another fieldwork method, cartographic mapping, based on teaching materials and outcomes of another design studio I taught at AHO. It addressed cartography as a medium for conducting fieldwork through recording and travelling along designated transects. The discussion was based on Trans-Alpine: From the Polar to the Peak, a landscape design studio of the Master of Landscape Architecture (Tromsø) programme in the spring of 2018. The studio took a trans-geographical approach when looking at alpine landscapes in the alpine zones of Norway and in Mount Gongga of China. The article described how field trips with fieldwork tools contributed to observing, recording and translating the landscape inquiries into design strategies; and how travelling along routes and detours allowed students to take pauses that could potentially be transformed into new places, designed or curated. The studio exhibition at Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum (The Art Museum of Northern Norway) created a platform for discussing the imagined future scenarios for China’s Mount Gongga and scripted a conversation with the alpine zones of Norway. The article was solo authored and published in the peer-reviewed journal Landscape Architecture Frontiers, in both English and Chinese, in the theme issue 'Practice Research and Pedagogical Innovation' in October 2018.

Article 4: Routes and Transects

The fourth article articulated the main findings of the changing alpine landscapes in the Mount Gongga region—an example of the ongoing transformation underway in China’s alpine territory. The article traced the

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scientific and the mountaineering history of Gongga, and the burgeoning urban footprint imposed from outside in recent years. It summarized the alternative readings of Gongga's alpine landscapes through the travelling transect approach, in which routes and pauses were planned and practiced, regionally, sub-regionally, and locally. The main findings pointed out the complex interplay of urbanization and alpine landscapes and the different conditions of Gongga’s eastern and western sides. Paradoxical situations on perception, flow, remoteness, and knowledge were found upon the travelling transects and visualized through photography and cartography.

These qualities were overlooked by urbanization processes, which emphasized imposed ideas and constructions. The article concluded with alternative ideas such as slow routes for Mount Gongga and the Hengduan mountains, considering future scenarios a process of curation with routes and pauses. The article was solo authored and written in English, accepted by the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA) in 2020.

Writing the exegesis

If the four articles are the key bones of a ‘body’ of work, the exegesis is the muscular system that connects the bones and makes the body a whole. In this first chapter, I have drawn a comprehensive background picture for the whole project, as none of the articles would have the space to accommodate it. Starting with the travel stories, I described how I found the primary subject of this PhD project, a high mountain, and how this mountain related to other researchers and other geographies around the world. I made a short introduction to the Hengduan Mountains and Mount Gongga, pointing out the significance and the urgency of understanding the landscapes of the high mountain under extensive urbanization. The main research questions, one on urbanization phenomena and one on methods of reading, were introduced, as were the research challenges I took on as a landscape architect and researcher. Article 1 was related to how are the alpine landscapes changing due to urbanization. Article 2 and Article 3 responded mainly to how could a landscape-informed perspective open up other ways of reading alpine landscapes. Article 4 addressed both the phenomena and the methods.

The second chapter contains the literature framework of the PhD project carrying a trans-geographical approach. I created ‘the geography of

literatures’, a sectional mapping diagram inspired by Alexander von Humboldt’s The Geography of Plants. This literature geography defines the related theories and research from urban studies, cultural geography, landscape architecture, and the idea of mountain. A list of concepts from the literature geography will be further reviewed. Literatures cited at each of the

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four articles link to specific ideas and terms in this list. The remaining terms are those that are not in the articles, but that significantly contribute to this project.

In the third chapter, I present the research methods. What are the empirical materials and why were specific materials chosen? How did I conduct travels and teach studios within the framework of research-through- design? The studio method was the topic of Article 2 and Article 3, and I discuss how the fieldwork methods in teaching inform research processes and findings. The travel notes present the itineraries, routes and detours of the five travels to Mount Gongga, which were not included in the articles.

The fieldwork tools and techniques—photographic and cartographic—were developed and applied during preparation, en-route, and post-travel. I will use travelling routes and pauses across multiple scales and dimension in discussing the transect method. My journeys to the Alps, the Scandes and the Andes, together with archival research visits in CAS Chengdu, ETH Zürich, Harvard University, and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, helped me

comprehend the case of Gongga with relational thinking across geographies.

The fourth chapter concerns the findings. Through the trans-geographical approach, the Swiss and the Norwegian alpine landscape strategies—‘heavy’

and ‘light’—can be found in the Hengduan, and this has proved the main hypothesis in Article 1. Through the repeated travels to Gongga, I discovered changing conditions in landscape spaces and practices due to the complex interplay of the urbanization and the alpine landscapes. The transect techniques revealed landscape qualities currently overlooked in Mount Gongga while the mountain is under construction. I will expand on the thematic landscape explorations of the studio course written in Article 3, and how students, upon travelling to Gongga, relate their designs to routes and adaptations of the pauses. The case of Mount Gongga belongs to the global phenomenon of extended urbanization, as discussed in Article 4. I suggest a curative approach for Mount Gongga.

The fifth chapter is the conclusion and further thoughts of the PhD project. I list four points as the main contribution of this dissertation to landscape architecture and the design discipline in general. Two exhibitions are the examples of how we may curate past and future alpine landscapes.

The first one was the final exhibition of the studio course Trans-Alpine: From the Polar to the Peak in June 2018 at the Art Museum of Northern Norway (NNKM). The second exhibition, originally planned to be in Oslo but moved only due to the global pandemic, will be at https://www.studiolibin.com/and run from the date of PhD defence. I will discuss the ideas behind the

curations and how can such an exhibition be seen as a platform for dialogue.

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Further, I will reflect on the expanded questions to be answered and to be explored in the future.

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Figure 1. Aerial image of the Hengduan Mountains, extracted from Google Earth in 2016, with mountains, cities, and transportation links labelled.

G5

G318

Kunming

Panzhihua Xichang

Ya’an

Daocheng

Kangding

Lijiang

Dali

7556m Gongga

6032m Three Holy

5596m Jade Dragon

600m / 1.5M pop 2600m / 0.1M pop

3800m / 0.03M pop

2400m / 1.3M pop

2000m / 0.6M pop

1500m / 0.5M pop

1100m / 1.2M pop

1900m / 6M pop

250 km

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Figure 2-2. Map of Mount Gongga (Minya Konka) cartography by Eduard Imhof, based on the expedition 1930-31 with Arnold Heim. Scale 1: 275,000.

Photograph by the author. ETH-Bibliothek, Hochschularchiv, E. Imhof zu Nr.60.

Figure 2-1. Aerial image of the Mount Gongga region, extracted from Google Earth in 2016, with places labelled.

Luding

Dadu River

Riwuqie Pass Panpanshan Pass

Shimian

Xinxing

Moxi

Zimei village Kompa

Shang Muju village Yulongxi village

Yulin village

Hailuogou glacier Gongba glacier

Yanzigou glacier

Zimei Pass

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Figure 3. Eight volumes of the travel journals on China by Arnold Heim. Photograph by the author. ETH-Bibliothek, Hochschularchiv, A. Heim Hs 494: 248 (China 1929) to Hs 494:255 (China 1931).

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Figure 4. Mount Gongga map in transparent layers and in publication (Zürich, 1974) by Eduard Imhof. Photograph by the author. ETH-Bibliothek, Hochschularchiv, E. Imhof zu Nr.61.

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1920s. Photographs by the author. Specimens from A: Herbarium of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University; Specimens from AMES: Orchid Herbarium of

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of Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Type: Sichuan, Rock No.16743; Sichuan, Wang (holo:E00879770). Photograph by the author.

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page. Drawing by the author.

illustration included in The Geography of Plants.

Source: Zentralbibliothek Zürich - Ideen zu einer

Geographie der Pflanzen nebst einem Naturgemälde der Tropenländer - 000012142.

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right connecting to the Alps. Drawing by the author.

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previous page. Drawing by the author.

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2 FRAMEWORK

The Geography of Literature

The upper limit of vegetation varies, like that of perpetual snows, according to the distance of the location from the poles or the slant of the sun’s ray.

—Alexander von Humboldt

When Prussian geographer and explorer Alexander von Humboldt climbed Mount Chimborazo in the Andes in 1802, he looked at this snow-covered volcano and recalled an observation he had made in other locations and climates: the conifers and lichens were similar to what he had observed in the Alps and the Arctic region of Europe.²³ Humboldt’s global observation from two centuries ago was ahead of its time, and it seems even more relevant to today in the Anthropocene Age. Named by the chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, Anthropocene is a human-dominated geological epoch since ‘the effects of humans on the global environment have

escalated’ during the past three centuries and they will continue to escalate in the future.²⁴Humboldt inspires contemporary researchers because of his immersed approach and ability to connect far-flung dots across geographies.

He discovered that the lichens in the Andes are similar to what he had found in Sápmi. Furthermore, Humboldt managed to translate knowledge of phytogeography recorded at multiple locations into visual representation, unfolding the similarities and differences across geographies.

——————————

23 Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015), 4-5.

24 Paul J. Crutzen, ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature 415, no. 6867 (January 2002), 23.

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In 1817, Humboldt and his colleague produced De Distributione

Geographica Plantarum (the Distribution of Geography of Plants), a sectional drawing to compare three high mountains—Chimborazo of the Andes, Mont Blanc of the Alps, Sulitjelma of the Scandes—in terms of their temperature, vegetation, tree line and snow line.²⁵ In addition to the parallel depiction of the phytography across high mountains, Humboldt's ‘mobile science’

emphasized the embodied experience in mapping the high mountains, adding humanistic and aesthetic layers to purely scientific studies.

Humboldt's Geography of Plants inspired me to structure a literature framework: ‘the Geography of Literature’. In the early stage, I developed a sectional diagram like Humboldt’s Tableau physique (1807) to start mapping out literatures linked to this project. The diagram is organized in three mountain sections: the Scandes and their Norwegian alpine zones, the Hengduan and their Mount Gongga, and the Alps and their Swiss alpine zones. I started to build up layers of topics from the bottom up accumulating fields of landscape architecture, reading landscapes, cultural geography, experiencing landscapes, tourism, the urbanization of rural China, Norway and Switzerland. The top layers comprises literature specifically on the alpine zones of the Scandes/Jotunheimen, the Hengduan/Gongga, the

Alps/Chamonix-Zermatt.

A List of Concepts

The geography of literature has been iterated dynamically as this project evolved. I realize that most of the concepts belong to multiple fields. There are a number of ideas relevant to this dissertation: high mountains, high places, shan shui, research-through-design, walking, mapping, space and place, spatial practice, extended urbanization, agency of landscape. Some are articulated in the articles (like space and place), and some are not unfolded (like high mountains and shan shui). I chose them because the first three ideas set the context of alpine landscapes, the middle three refer to the theories behind the chosen research methods, and the last four support the unconventional understanding of urbanization and the effects in this dissertation.

——————————

25 Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Essay on the Geography of Plants (University of Chicago Press, 2010): figure 2.

李宾 | 跨高山的景观 —— 剖行变化之中的一座中国高山

TRANS-ALPINE LANDSCAPES

Transecting a Chinese high mountain in transition

李宾 | 跨高山的景观 —— 剖行变化之中的一座中国高山

LI, Bin

Trans-alpine Landscapes

Transecting a Chinese high mountain in transition

CONTENTS

Abstract

Acknowledgements

1 INTRODUCTION

A Mountain in Transition

给中国最美的地方画个圈。

横断山脉群

——————————

古人不爱极高山

——————————

我们征服了世界闻名的高峰：中国第一支登山队征服贡嘎山记

榆林

——————————

——————————

横

——————————

——————————

国道

——————————

户外资料网编辑中心

上半年中国户外旅行用户行为分析报告》发布 - 图说 -

户外资料网

户外资料网

——————————

——————————

我们征服了世界闻名的高峰

贡嘎山植被

贡嘎山高山生态环境研究

贡嘎山森林生态 系统研究

——————————

李娴

贡嘎山地区旅游地学特征及开发模式研究

博士

成都理工大学

赵川

贡嘎山地学景观 保护与开发模式研究

博士

成都理工大学

——————————

中国人口之分布——附统计表与密度图--

《地理学报》

年

期

——————————

风景园林

2 FRAMEWORK

The Geography of Literature

——————————

——————————

贡嘎山森林生态系统研究

贡嘎山地学景观保护与开发模式研究